Pottery Barn had a sale on salad plates. Look, I really don’t want to get into a conversation about weight or body image or any of that right now, so we’re just gonna skip ahead to the facts: I want to eat my food off of smaller plates. I don’t have any salad plates. I needed to order salad plates.
And I needed some bowls, too, but that’s because five of the eight that came with our dishes broke. The three plastic ones I bought on clearance at Walmart eight years ago are starting to show some wear from being microwaved about 873 times. Yes, I know about plastic and cancer. I bought new bowls and threw away the plastic ones, ok? Leave me alone.
The blue and white floral plates, saucers, and bowls that remain in our cabinet are from a set Chad’s mom bought for us at the now-defunct MM Cohn just before we got married. I can’t get rid of those dishes.
Chad thinks I’m not sentimental, but he’s wrong. My apparent disregard for the nostalgia attached to certain items is just me overcompensating for how strongly I really feel it. We lived in a college-owned apartment for six months after we got married, and those are the dishes that I put into the cabinet before we actually lived there together, knowing we’d share meals and eat off of them as husband and wife.
As we both endured the process of me learning to cook like a mom instead of a teenage girl, we sat together at our tiny table eating mediocre food from those plates and bowls. We scraped inedible foods into the trash from those dishes. I hand washed them for years before we moved into a house with a dishwasher.
When people brought food to us after each of our three babies, we ate from those dishes. Or maybe paper plates, but those blue and white dishes were still in the cabinet, waiting for us. The dishes have lived in as many places as we have (four), and have made each journey with us.
I can’t get rid of those dishes.
I wanted to bring in something that would complement the dishes we already have, that would coordinate. I wanted to keep what we had and also add something new.
I love the beautiful contrast of intentionally mixed designs and styles, of layered patterns and colors that somehow seem meant to come together in spite of their differences, instead of looking like they were all manufactured in the same place at the same time on the same machine.
I like a little chaos mixed into my order.
So, I bought the red, blue, white, and teal Moroccan-style salad plates (and the coordinating bowls) from Pottery Barn’s online clearance section. But I needed a few more to make a whole set and to prepare for the inevitable breaking of dishes that’s bound to occur, and I didn’t want everything to be exactly the same.
After a little more on-line shopping, I found another set of blue and white plates and bowls from a different website, searched for coupons, and made my purchase.
So here’s what I ended up with: four Moroccan salad plates that all go together and all have different designs on them, four slightly more casual country-ish salad plates that all have different designs on them, and bowls that mostly follow suit.
As pieces break or get lost, I can just find any old thing that coordinates well enough to blend in and add it to the mix. Bonus points if it actually is old and comes from a junk store. This is exactly how I like to live my life.
As I washed those new dishes, I started thinking about the people our children may one day add to our family. They’re going to be different from us; they won’t match. But each addition can coordinate. Different doesn’t mean they won’t fit. It means they’ll add new beauty and dimension and lovely contrast that just makes everything more interesting.
I hope I can remember that the first time I get really irritated at one of them for doing something stupid.
Because of the work I’ve done in and around schools, my network of connections and friends is filled with people who are different from me. Many of them don’t look like me, don’t think like me, and don’t live like me. We don’t match. Like those multi-colored dishes with their red and blue and white and teal, we have just enough overlap to connect, to belong together, and to be even more interesting together simply because we don’t match.
My life is so much richer for inviting those people in. I learn so much from them, and I like to think that maybe they’re learning things from me, too. They open up my view of the world, they sharpen and challenge me, they encourage me differently because of who they are.
I know they’re just dishes, but it’s been interesting to me waching how my family has reacted to the new plates. I bought them for myself, really, but since the paper plates have run out, everyone has been reaching for one of the new salad plates from the cabinet.
Sometimes what we really need is something a little different.
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